“I WANT to kill myself sometimes when I think I’m the only person in the world and the part of me that feels that way is trapped inside this body that only bumps into other bodies without ever connecting with the only person in the world trapped inside of them,” Johnny agonizes in Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune (1987). “We gotta connect. We just have to. Or we die.”

That Obscure Object of Fulfillment

“Only connect,” one man in a gay chat room volunteers to another in McNally’s new play, Some Men (which completed its limited run in New York in late April and is certain to become a staple of the regional gay theater circuit). Unfortunately, his correspondent’s recognition of gay novelist E. M. Forster as the source of the quote fails to guarantee a bond between the two men. The play, which is a series of vignettes of American gay life from 1922 to the present framed by the events at a gay wedding, readily admits to the difficulties of finding a satisfying relationship: sexual chemistry may not be present when other elements of attraction are; personal insecurities such as a fear of social disapproval or a reluctance to limit oneself to just one sexual partner become barriers to engagement; gay self-loathing proves a bell jar that suffocates the most promising relationship. Thus, in one of the play’s most poignant scenes, a 1930’s Harlem club performer narrates his relationship with a self-loathing composer that resulted in the song “Ten Cents a Dance.” And in one of the play’s most hilarious scenes, a pair of Queer Studies majors from Vassar is offended to learn that a long-married couple did not feel oppressed in pre-Stonewall America (“It was different then. We didn’t make so much of a fuss. … We just wanted to be happy”).

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The Gay & Lesbian Review / Worldwide (The G&LR) is a bimonthly magazine targeting an educated readership of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (GLBT) men and women. Under the tagline, “a bimonthly journal of history, culture, and politics,” The G&LR publishes essays in a wide range of disciplines as well as reviews of books, movies, and plays.